


Ragged Breath

by bluerosebouquet



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, and steve is emo over tony, tony is emo over steve, tony is in love with pepper and steve and you can't change my mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 01:44:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19122070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluerosebouquet/pseuds/bluerosebouquet
Summary: Tony has a hard time breathing when Steve is around.  But finally, after everything, he speaks his mind.





	Ragged Breath

Tony had gotten used to losing his breath when it came to Steve.  It had taken way way too long for him to realize that he was losing his breath because of Steve.

He didn’t like to be coddled or like to be seen as weak.  That had been his thing since....well, at least since the cave in Afghanistan.  When Nebula helped him off the ship, with the glowing flying lady in the badass suit having carried the whole thing back to earth (if he wasn’t so god damn tired, he would have been asking her a million questions), Tony tried to hold himself up.  He could walk, even if he had been starving to death and fighting off an infection for the past three weeks.  That was until, of course, Steve came running up to him, taking him from Nebula and holding Tony, one hand on his back, one hand on his chest.  Tony wished that he could look a little better for their reunion, since Steve, as usual, looked like he was carved from marble, damn him.

He chalked up his breathlessness to the change in atmosphere, and not at all Steve’s warm, broad hands holding him steady.  Looking up at Steve, Tony spoke the first words he had said in days,

“Couldn’t stop him.”

He almost expected judgement from Steve, not that he had ever judged him before.  Not everyone could defeat anything just with plucky confidence and biceps made of gold.  But Steve always managed to surprise him.

“Neither could I.”

Tony turned to Steve, not really knowing what he wanted, but knowing that if he didn’t tell Steve, he wouldn’t ever tell anyone.

“I lost the kid.”

Steve face, which was so full of concern for him, only deepened in its sadness.

“Tony we lost.”

God damn Steve Rogers and God damn his ridiculous need to care about Tony when Tony didn’t fucking deserve it, but there were more pressing matters at hand.

“Is...um-”

Pepper appeared before he could make another sound.  And the way Steve made him breathless, Pepper made him feel like he could breathe for the first time.  Opposites that Tony adored.

They cleaned him up, Bruce put an IV in him and Tony, forced by Pepper to accept that he could not, in fact, stand on his own, sat in a wheelchair and watched the faces of the vanished flick by like grains of sand in an hourglass.  Wilson, Barnes, Lang, Fury, Maria, Wanda, T’Challa, and Peter.  He barely registered what anyone was saying, as the bowl of oatmeal that Bruce had made him grew colder with every passing second.  And as the oatmeal got colder, his anger grew hotter.  He was angry, so angry at Steve for abandoning him, for not speaking to him, for choosing Barnes over him.

He sat, seething as Natasha talked to the room.  His eyes wandered, trying to find a distraction, and he alit on Thor, sitting silently away from everyone else.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s pissed,” said the raccoon...wait...what?  Tony didn’t even hear the rest of the literal raccoon’s sentence.

“Honestly, until this exact second, I thought you were a Build-A-Bear.”

Tony saw Steve’s mouth twitch in a smile.  The way it made his heart jump only made him angrier.

“Tony, you fought him.”

Are you fucking joking?

“Who told you that?” he said, unable to keep his mouth shut, “I didn’t fight him.  No, he wiped my face with a planet while the Bleeker Street magician gave away the store.  That’s what happened.  There was no fight because-”

“Okay.”

Steve was trying to placate him, but Tony was done being placated by Steve.

“He’s unbeatable.”

“Did he give you any clues?  Any coordinates?  Anything?”

Fuck this.  Time to lay it all out.

“I saw this coming a few years back.  I had a vision, didn’t want to believe it, thought I was dreaming.”

“Tony,” fuck the way his name sounded when it came out of Steve’s mouth, and fuck the way he came closer to him, “I’m gonna need you to focus.”

“And I needed you.”

There it was.  Simple.  Four words.  Exactly how he felt about Steve, all out on the line.

“As in past tense,” he was starting to build up steam, even though the way Steve was looking at him threatened to break his heart, “That trumps what you need.  It’s too late buddy.  Sorry”

It was too late because how the hell do they move past this?

“You know what I need,” he said, struggling to his feet because if everyone else could stand he would too, “I need a shave.”

The bowl of oatmeal clattered to the floor, splattering on the table, just like Tony’s heart splintered when Steve tried to kill him in Siberia.

“And I believe I remember,” he said, ripping the IV out of his arm while Rhodey protested, “Telling why that otherwise that what we needed was a suit of armor around the world.  Remember that?  Whether it impacted our precious freedoms or not.  That’s what we needed.”

“Well that didn’t work out, did it?”

If it hadn’t been Steve, and Tony hadn’t been shaking, he would have decked him.

“I said we’d lose.  You said we’ll do that together too,” Tony could see the pain cross Steve’s face, and it gave him some kind of small vindication to know that he might feel just a little bit of guilt for choosing his mother’s killer over him, “And guess what Cap?  We lost.  And you weren’t there.”

Tony voice started to break.  He could feel the tears, hot and wet, in his eyes, so he let the anger take over again, because anger he could control.  He could rage and storm at Steve all day long and not have to think about that betrayal and about how Steve made his heart race and his mouth go dry and his lungs stop working.

“But that’s what we do right, our best work after the fact.  The Avengers, we’re the Avengers, not the prevengers, right?”

“Okay,” said Rhodey, holding his shoulders, “You’ve made your point, just sit down okay?”

“No, no no,” Tony said, talking over Rhodey and pointing to the badass ship-carrying lady...Carol, “You’re great by the way.  We need you, you’re new blood.”

“Tony, sit down!”

“Bunch of tired old mills.”

But that’s just it.  He hadn’t made his point.  He forced his way over to Steve, meeting his eyes with desperation in his own.  Steve had to understand what he had done to him.  That Steve had broken his heart.  How do you tell someone that your heart was shattered into a million pieces by them?  Unfixable.  Broken even to the mechanic.

“I got nothing for you, Cap.  I got no coordinates, no clues no strategies no options zero zip nada no trust...liar.”

He could feel the energy draining out of him, the venom in his words and the pain on Steve’s face sapping him of his resolve, so he did the only thing he could do.  He ripped the arc-reactor out of his chest and forced it into Steve’s hand.  

“Here, take this.  You find him, you put that on,” his legs started to give way, “And you hide.”

He collapsed onto the ground, and Steve immediately dropped too, putting his hand on Tony’s arm.  The room was spinning, but he would not be weak, not when he had finally given Steve Rogers his heart.

“I’m fine. I-”

The last thing he saw before he passed out was Steve unfairly blue eyes.

Tony woke up in darkness.  He was disoriented and wanted immediately to be away from wherever he was because there was beeping and softly glowing screens and he hated hospitals, but the person in the chair next to his bedside made him stop.  Steve was still holding the arc reactor, which was glowing faintly in his hands.

Steve looked so much older than when they had first met.  They had been coldly distant with one another, essentially only speaking to argue with each other.  And if you had asked Tony then that the very sight of Steve would essentially render him useless, he would never have believed you.

Sure, he could appreciate Steve for the fine piece of ass that he was.  But Tony had insisted, before the battle of New York, that everything special about Steve came out of a bottle.  As the years went on, Tony realized that Steve was far, far more than a bottle of chemicals.  He knew that Steve loved playing Stardew Valley on Tony’s PS4, that he refused to reach level 100 in the desert mines if it meant not feeding and giving his livestock their daily dose of affection.  He knew that Steve liked to bring Tony coffee in his lab at 2 am, when they were the only ones in the tower that were awake.  He knew that Steve smiled in his sleep sometimes, and that Tony would unconsciously mirror that smile when he saw it.

He wasn’t sure when Steve had gotten the power to take his breath away, and he knew that Steve would always have that power, no matter how angry he was at him.

A part of Tony wished that he could forget Steve and forget all the little things they knew about each other.  But even though he was angry and hurt and grieving, he still found himself smiling when Steve, dozing in the chair, smiled in his sleep.

Tony stirred a little and Steve jolted awake, looking at him with guilt and a little bit of fear in his eyes.

“I can go if-”

“No.  No.  Stay.”

Tony saw some of the tension bleed out of his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Tony.”

“Unfortunately, you’re gonna have to be more specific, Cap.”

“For it all but...mostly for Siberia.  I shouldn’t have left you.”

“And I probably shouldn’t have tried to kill Barnes.  Even though he...yeah.”

They both looked away from each other, the weight of what they could say hanging over each of them.

After a while, they looked up in the same moment, and Steve reached out to take Tony’s hand.  Tony took it, and watched Steve’s radiant smile, holding Tony’s hand and his heart in each hand.

**Author's Note:**

> *record scratch* *freeze frame* I bet you're wondering how I got here. Oh yeah it's because I saw Endgame for the fifth time (I have a problem) and truly find something else gay to write about because the 2012 Stony stan in me is constantly fed when seeing this film.


End file.
